Exploring European Cultural Heritage Using Conversational Agents

Abstract

The semantic web and open data paradigms are gaining momentum in recent years and more information is being published online following the linked data principles. This enables easy access and processing of data by external services. An example of such services are intelligent conversational agents that provide to the users the ability to interact with a computer system in natural language. Such communication is much more intuitive and facilitates the use of complex services to less skilled users (e.g., elderly) or users with disabilities (e.g., visually impaired) thus providing to these groups access to the huge amount of information stored in the semantic web or specific online services. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept conversational agent able to provide information about the European cultural heritage and display stored digital content from the Europeana database